advice on speeding up the backup

[10sai]

yeah i figured it wasn't the app's fault; unless different copy methods were slower/faster than others. i was also curious if differnet copy methods used different amount of resources; whether a "smart copy" would use more RAM/CPU than a simple copy over new or different files.
i'm also curious where someone would start to diagnose it, whether it'd be at the network level, the array level, etc.
-patrick